Alice's Restaurant
by RobotKat
Summary: Dan sings us an altered version of the folk song of the same name. In short, Dan and co. dump trash in the Doom Dimension, and get arrested by Masquerade. And more!


Uh, well, I'd like to start off by saying that I'm really sorry to Arlo Guthrie. On the side of preparing for my 11th grade first semester final exams and working on _Just A Little Girl_, I made this here fiction, which is an altered version of the song of the same name. I don't think a lot of you guys have heard the original version, thus find it as funny, but hopefully this isn't a failure…

(Also note how I spelled Dan's last name, since I want everyone to know this. 'Kuuso', the direct Japanese spelling, means 'conceit'. 'Kuso', minus one 'u', is the informal Japanese word for 'feces'.)

* * *

"Dan, are you home?" Dan's mother called out from the living room, in the middle of a complex exercise.

"Yeah, Mom!" He called out, heading up the stairs, smuggling a wrapped object under his arm. "I'll be in my room!"

"There's ice cream in the fridge if you want it!" She called out after him, cut off by the door slamming distantly. In the meantime, Dan hurriedly unwrapped the little guitar he'd borrowed from the music room. He looked to his computer and turned on the webcam.

"Is this recording?" He mumbled to himself. After a moment, he adjusted his chair and picked up the little guitar, clumsily strumming it.

"This song is called _Alice's Restaurant_, and it's about Alice, and the restaurant. But Alice's Restaurant isn't the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song _Alice's Restaurant_.

_You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant,_

_You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant._

_Walk right in, it's down the lane,_

_Servin' sherbet and cocoa and chow mein,_

_You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant._

Now it all started a year ago, when my friend Marucho and I went to visit Alice at the restaurant. But Alice doesn't live in the restaurant. She lives in the house behind the restaurant, with Runo and her parents. And living in the house like that, they've got a lot of room in the yard where the house connects to the restaurant. They had cleared out the yard, and having all that room, they decided that they didn't have to take out their garbage for a long time.

We got up there, we found all the garbage in the yard, and we decided it'd be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city recycling plant. So Alice, Marucho, Runo and I took the half a ton of garbage, put it in a bag on the back of my bike, and headed on toward the recycling plant.

Well, we got there, and there was a big sign on the front door of the plant, saying "No Unaccompanied Minors Admitted". And we had never heard of a recycling plant that didn't let in kids, and with tears in our eyes, we biked off into the sunset looking for a place to hide the garbage for a while.

We didn't find one. Then Alice suddenly had an idea and pulled out a Doom card, and I'm never gonna ask how she got it, but we looked in the portal and saw there was a pile of garbage down in the Doom Dimension. And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up and take it, we decided to throw ours down.

That's what we did, so we biked back to the restaurant, had a lot of ice cream and noodles, and went to sleep until late the next morning. Then when we got visited by Masquerade.

He said, "Dan, I found your name on a letter at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had anything to say about it."

And I said, "Yes sir, Masquerade, I cannot tell a lie. I put that letter _under_ that garbage."

After speaking to Masquerade for fifteen minutes, he finally said that we had to go pick up the garbage, and to go speak to him in Hal-G's place. So we got on our bikes and back to the place where Alice threw that card.

Now guys, there were only one or two things that Masquerade could've done at Hal-G's place, and the first was he could have thanked us for being so brave and honest by actually coming down…which wasn't very likely, so we didn't expect it. The other thing was that he could have pounded the snot out of me and told me never to bike garbage around Vestroia again, which is what _I_ expected. But when we got to Hal-G's place there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted on, and that was where Marucho and I were both immediately captured. Handcuffed.

And I said, "Masquerade, I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on."

He said, "Shut up, Dan. Get in the portal."

And that's what we did. We jumped through a Doom portal and fell to the 'Scene of the Crime'. It was supposedly the biggest crime in Vestroia in the last fifty years, and all these Bakugan were hanging around it. Some Vestals took twenty-seven eight-by-ten glossy colour photographs with circles, arrows, and a paragraph explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

After all that, we went back to Hal-G's place. Masquerade said he was going to put us in a cell. He said, "Dan, I'm going to put you in this cell. I want your wallet and your Bakugan."

And I said, "Masquerade, I can understand you wanting my wallet so I don't have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you want my Bakugan for?"

He said, "Dan, I don't want any battles."

I said, "Masquerade, did you think I ever wanted to battle Bakugan in a jail?"

Masquerade said he was making sure, and he took out the toilet seat so I couldn't hit myself over the head and drown. He took out the toilet paper so Marucho couldn't bend the bars, roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll, and escape. It was about an hour later that Alice (remember Alice? It's a song about Alice) and Runo came by to bust us out of jail, and we went back to the restaurant. We had even more ice cream and noodles, and didn't get up until the late next morning, when we got summoned by Hal-G.

We walked into his place, sat down, and Masquerade came in with the twenty-seven pictures. Hal-G came in and said, "All right. Show me."

Masquerade stood up with the twenty-seven pictures, and Hal-G sat down with them, and he says, "This is the big thing you kept bragging about to me?"

Masquerade looked at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour pictures and started to cry, because Masquerade came to the realization that Hal-G was old and had bigger problems or something like that, and there wasn't anything he could do about it. Then we had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but that's not what I came to tell you about.

I came to talk about the school health exam.

They got a special team downtown called the School Board Inspectors, where they walk into school and poke you around. I got called down to the gym to get my physical examination one day, and I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning, 'cause I wanted to look like some normal kid from Tokyo. But they put me through a lot of height tests, eye tests, stretch tests, memory and brain tests, and after, I didn't feel too good about it all.

I was there for an hour, maybe two hours? I was there for a long time going through all kinds of boring things and I was just having a tough time there, and they were checking every single part of me. I finally went to see the last guy, who was at a desk.

I walked up and said, "What do you want?"

He said, "Mr. Kuuso, I've only got one question. Have you ever been arrested?"

And I started to tell him the story of the Alice's Restaurant Madness, with the Doom Dimension and the noodles and Marucho's toilet seat…and he stopped me right there and said, "Mr. Kuuso, I want you to go and sit down on that table that says Table C…_now_, Mr. Kuuso!"

And I walked over to that table, and Table C's where they put you if you're one of those weird kids that misbehave. There were all kinds of creepy-looking kids on the bench there. Vestals! All of them sitting right there next to me! And the freakiest one was coming over to me, Shadow, and he sat down next to me and asked, "Dan, what did you get?"

I said, "I didn't get anything. I had to pick up garbage."

He said, "What were you in trouble for, Dan?"

And I said, "Littering."

They all moved away from me at the table, until I said, "And for dumping it in the Doom Dimension."

And they all came back and shook my hand. We had a great time on the bench, talking about Bakugan. And everything was fine until the examiner came over, had some papers in his hand, held them up and said…

"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say," and he went on for ten minutes and nobody understood a word he said.

But we all had fun filling out the forms and playing with the little pencils, and I wrote out the whole Alice's Restaurant Madness just like it was. Everything was fine and I turned over the piece of paper, and there on the other side, in capital letters, italics and stars, was the following:

_* HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF? *_

I went over to the examiner and said, "Doc, you got some nerve to ask me if I've 'rehabilitated' myself! I mean, I'm sitting here at Table C 'cause you think I'm a delinquent for throwing trash in the Doom Dimension!"

He looked at me and said, "Mr. Kuuso, I don't like your kind, and I'm going to give your fingerprints to the school board."

So, guys. Somewhere in the school board office is a file with my fingerprints. The reason I'm singing you this song now is 'cause you or someone you know might have a similar problem. There's only one thing you can do, and that's walk into the principal's office wherever you are, and say "Ma'am, you can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant." Then walk out.

You know, if only one person does it, people might think they're really crazy and they won't care. And if two people do it in perfect harmony, people might think they're both drunk and they won't care. And if three people walk in, sing a bar of _Alice's Restaurant_ and walk out, people might think they're all on a dare. And can you imagine if fifty people a day walk in, sing a verse of _Alice's Restaurant_ and walk out? People might think it's a movement.

And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Madness Movement. And all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it starts up.

_You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant_

_You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant_

_Walk right in, it's down the lane,_

_Servin' sherbet and cocoa and chow mein,_

_You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant_

So we'll wait till it comes around again, and this time, with four part harmony and feeling.

Everybody now!

_You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant_

Except Alice!

_You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant_

_Walk right in, it's down the lane,_

_Servin' sherbet and cocoa and chow mein,_

_You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant_

Yeah!"

* * *

Dan carefully shut off the webcam and turned back to his bed, setting the little guitar back down in its case. Drago, seated on the bookshelf, swivelled to look at him.

"Dan, that was a terrible song," the Bakugan growled.

"No it wasn't," Dan replied briskly, putting the guitar under his arm. "Now I gotta get this back to school before they notice."

Fin


End file.
